Browsing by Subject "Violence"

Now showing 1 - 15 of 15
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    Agonistic politics, contest, and the Oresteia.
    (2012-06) Gagnon, Jennifer Marie
    Contemporary political theorists, such as William Connolly, Bonnie Honig, and Chantal Mouffe, have adopted the agon from ancient political thought as a critique against liberal theories of pluralism and tolerance. These thinkers view the agon broadly as the institution of contestation and emphasize the beneficial aspects of conflict, strife, and discord for democracy. Despite the adoption of the ancient Greek agon, contemporary agonistic theory exhibits a strange silence towards the ancient roots, experiences, and meanings of the agon. This curious inattention to the ancient understandings and historical contexts of the agon have resulted in a "de-Hellenization" of agonism; contemporary agonistic political theory has stripped the agon of its uniquely Greek-heroic historical characteristics and experiences resulting in an anemic understanding of the place of violence, strife, and contestation in democratic politics. In an effort to re-Hellenize contemporary understandings of agonism I turn to the heroic-epic of Homer's Iliad and the tragic world of Aeschylus' Oresteia. In the Iliad, "The Shield of Achilles" serves as a microcosm of multiple sites of contestation that touch upon all aspects of human life. The shield depicts a world that accepts conflict and discord. Reading the Oresteia as a series of agonistic contests questions the assumptions of agonistic theory that contest leads to a mutual recognition of identities and differences. The Oresteia demonstrates that the challenge of agonistic theory is not to affirm the perpetuity of contests as Honig posits, but to question whether these aggressive tendencies can be controlled and channeled without eradicating differences or limiting the political. By returning to classical conceptions of the agon, this dissertation seeks to demonstrate that contemporary agonistic theory displaces the bloody roots of contest and diminishes the propensity for contests to spiral into violence.
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    Athlete perceptions and consequences of parental background anger in youth ice hockey
    (2012-05) Winges, James Brian
    One of the largest problems within the landscape of youth ice hockey is poor parental behavior. It is not uncommon to witness parents yelling and engaging in harassment and arguments with referees, coaches, other parents and players. Occasionally, physical fights between parents and/or coaches occur as well as parents yelling at their own and other kids. From the perspective of the observer these behaviors constitute background anger. Background anger as a construct within sport is defined as "the presence of verbal, nonverbal, or physical conflict between individuals that does not directly involve the observer" (Cummings & Cummings, 1988; Omli & LaVoi, 2009, p. 244). While it is suspected that background anger may promote stress in youth sport participants, little research has been conducted to directly assess its effects (Omli, LaVoi, & Wiese-Bjornstal, 2008; Omli & LaVoi, 2009). The purpose of this project was to assess the perceptions and consequences of parental background anger in youth ice hockey from the players' perspective utilizing the background anger framework of Cummings and Cummings (1988). Two studies were conducted to assess player perceptions of parental background anger. The first utilized a mixed methods design to examine youth perceptions and emotional responses associated with angry dad, angry mom, and fighting dads types of background anger. Participants were adolescent ice hockey players (94 male & 99 female). Players were sampled from USA Hockey's Advance 15 camps who were all born in 1994; making them 15 years old at the time of the study. Exact age was not taken because of the homogeneity of the sample. The Advance 15 camps represent the 102 best male and 102 best female players in the state and are tryout-based camps. Players were asked about experienced situations that were similar to one of three pictures, each depicting a different parental background anger type. Results indicated that female players perceived significantly more background anger in their games than did their male peers regardless of background anger type. Females also responded to background anger with significantly lower confidence and encouragement and greater frustration than their male peers. The angry dad background anger type created significantly greater frustration and lesser encouragement than the fighting dads background anger type, regardless of gender. Player responses indicated that the different types of background anger have different primary causes. These causes included parent behavior, referee call, player behavior, parent personality, player performance and coach behavior. The second study utilized a before and after quantitative design to assess player perceptions of and consequences to parental background anger. One hundred and thirteen Bantam male and 124 U14 female Minnesota Hockey players were sampled such that player perceptions of the normal game experience were compared to those of an experienced event where one of three types of parental background anger occurred. Results indicated that when background anger occurs there are significant detrimental changes to player emotions, performance, fun, and intensity. All of these changes were contrary to the desired outcomes of a youth sport experience. Females and males responded similarly but with different magnitude to background anger, such that females experienced greater detrimental changes in emotions, performance, and fun than males. Males experienced a greater detrimental change in intensity than did females. Female and male players perceived the causes of background anger similarly and results suggest that the different background anger types have significantly different causes. Overall these studies support the contention that parental background anger is detrimental to the health and well-being of youth ice hockey players. Results lend support to the use of the Cummings and Cummings (1988) model of background anger in the home and the use of this model in sport (Omli et al., 2008; Omli & LaVoi, 2009) as well as the new model of background anger in sport (LaVoi, Omli, & Wiese-Bjornstal, 2012). If parents continue to engage in the creation of background anger, their children will feel worse, play worse, have less fun, and play with less intensity. Downstream this could have negative effects on participation, skill development, and advancement in the sport.
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    Co-creating community change: responding to violence through youth media practice
    (2014-05) Sethi, Jenna Kristen
    Young people have unprecedented access to media. They are not just "watching" media content; they are critiquing popular media and creating a variety of their own media projects to examine their lived experience (Sefton-Green & Soep, 2007; Chavez & Soep, 2005). The purpose of this critical qualitative study was to illuminate the ways youth, as active agents, address violence in their communities through producing media. The second purpose of this study was to better understand the youth work practices that support young people who examine and change their communities. The following questions guided this project: How do youth experience violence in their communities? How do youth create media to address violence? What does the process of creating media to address violence mean to them? What youth work practices support the efforts of young people in the process of creating media to address violence in their respective communities?Constructivist, critical and participatory theories guided this study (Guba & Lincoln, 2000; Friere, 1970; Cammarota & Fine, 2008). Semi-structured in-depth interviews (Kvale & Brinkman, 2009; Patton, 2005; Madison, 2005) with 15 staff and young filmmakers, mural and spoken word artists in three different urban communities were conducted in order to better understand this phenomenon. Findings expand upon our knowledge of young people's experience with violence. Their experience required a multifaceted analysis of violence including: physical, structural, institutional and emotional realities. Young people in this study created media to address these forms of violence through a sustained and complex process that included personal growth, building media skills and community development. Youth workers supported this process through creating an intentional sense of belonging attuned to young people's context, culture and community. They also co-created spaces where spiritual healing and critical hope could flourish by standing with youth to examine and speak back to injustice inspiring positive change.
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    Conditions and courses of genocide
    (2014-06) Brehm, Hollie Nyseth
    After the Nazi Holocaust, the international community vowed to prevent genocide from occurring in the future. Yet, genocide has continued to occur. Accordingly, this study seeks to better understand why and how genocide takes place. I ask two key questions: 1) What are the causes of genocide at societal, state, and international levels? and 2) What accounts for temporal and regional variation in violence within genocides? To assess what leads to genocide, I conduct an event history analysis of the preconditions of genocide in all countries over the last 50 years. This quantitative analysis examines factors associated with the onset of genocide at the societal level (such as ethnolinguistic diversity), state level (such as type of government), and the international level (such as trade), finding that factors at each level must be considered in order to understand why genocides take place and that civil wars are the strongest predictors of genocide. While the event history analysis treats genocide as a single event, viewing genocide as an undifferentiated event misses opportunities to better understand the violence. Thus, the second part of this dissertation draws upon three case studies to analyze regional and temporal variation in genocidal violence in Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Sudan. I rely upon quantitative models to test how numerous factors drawn from genocide studies, the study of political and ethnic violence, and criminology--such as ethnic diversity, resource scarcity, unemployment levels, education levels, or the presence of certain armies--influence the onset and magnitude of certain forms of violence at meso levels. I also conducted fieldwork and 113 interviews with survivors, scholars, and other witnesses. Overall, I find that the factors associated with regional and temporal differences in violence vary based on who the perpetrators are and how they are organized. In Rwanda, members of the community who were not part of previously organized formal groups participated in the violence. As such, criminology's social disorganization theory--which argues that community cohesion influences crime rates--helps explain variation in this violence. In Bosnia-Herzegovina and Darfur, however, previously organized armies and militias generally committed the violence. Accordingly, strategic concerns dictated patterns.
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    Cooperation, Competition, and Killing: Reproductive strategies of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)
    (2023-08) Massaro, Anthony
    Group-living commonly involves tensions between conflict and cooperation. Group members need one another to survive, but also compete for access to key resources such as food and mates. To better understand reproductive strategies in group-territorial species with sex-biased dispersal, I used decades of data from Gombe National Park, Tanzania to test hypotheses regarding how and why chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) cooperate, compete, and fight. First, I found that male chimpanzees exhibit a consistently high degree of participation in boundary patrols (mean=75%) and that the best predictors of participation in patrols were sighting frequency and participation in hunting bouts, indicating a mutualistic payoff structure for male territorial effort. Second, I found that female chimpanzees produced copulation calls more frequently when they were nulliparous, and in the early days of their swelling. Thus, these calls likely function as an anti-infanticide strategy, inducing otherwise uninterested males to mate and maximizing the pool of potential sires. Females also called less frequently in the presence of higher-ranking females, indicating that intrasexual competition plays a role in call production. Third, I found that males killed by other chimpanzees suffered a higher-than-expected rate of genital wounding, but during non-fatal fighting, only in one of four communities (Kasekela) did males experience a higher-than-expected rate of genital wounds. Females in all four study communities experienced a higher-than-expected rate of genital wounds, indicating that genital wounding is an unlikely alternative to lethal aggression. Finally, I found that lethal aggression was more common in Mitumba than Kasekela. As a smaller community, Mitumba has fewer females and thus less overlap between reproductively active females and a greater opportunity to monopolize mating opportunities. Overall, this work emphasizes the importance of within-group reproductive competition.
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    Evaluation of Learning Outcomes: “Why Does She Stay?” Class Exercise
    (2016) Hurlburt, Allison
    Attitudes of domestic abuse have been studied for many years. Now researchers look to see if there are ways to change those negative attitudes and have people understand the dynamics of abuse; having more empathy toward the situation and victim. Classroom exercises can be a useful tool to teach empathy. In this study I use the exercise, “Why Does She Stay?” to see if this can be done. In this study, after a pre test, class exercise, and posttest, I found that the class exercise increased the understanding of dynamics of domestic abuse. Females had a greater significant change in their understanding than males did. There was also an age group of 19, 20, and 21 years old had the greatest increase.
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    Greenhouse Democracy: A Political Theory for Climate Change
    (2017-09) Hobbs-Morgan, Chase
    This dissertation offers a critique of what scholars have called the ‘dominant climate imaginary:’ a way of thinking that animates mainstream climate politics. It proposes in turn a ‘democratic imaginary’ through which to respond to anthropogenic climate change. Through the lens of the dominant imaginary: 1) climate change appears as an essentially technical and scientific problem, 2) the impacts of climate change are presumed to be spatially and/or temporally distant, and 3) individuals and communities implicated in a changing climate are encouraged to accept that countering climate change is primarily the responsibility of distant organizations and institutions. As such, the dominant imaginary provides little room for centering and addressing everyday entanglements with climate change, even as it stymies opportunities for approaching climate change through bottom-up, democratic politics. In response, this dissertation argues that concerned political theorists and activists ought resist the dominant climate imaginary, and proposes the concept of ‘climate violence’ as a means of doing so. Once climate change is understood as a problem of violence – and therefore not only a technical and scientific problem – questions about its political implications are more easily asked. Who is responsible for the problem? Who is most impacted? How should those who are implicated in one way or another think about responsibility for, and democratic responses to, climate change? Having critiqued the dominant imaginary and argued for the concept of climate violence, the dissertation ends with a turn to democratic and feminist political theorists. By putting such theorists into conversation with the problem of climate violence, I end by outlining ‘greenhouse democracy’ a set of ecologically sensitive democratic commitments and provocations. According to greenhouse democracy the experience of living under the threat of climate violence, rather than any official citizenship granted by states, qualifies and invites one to participate in building bottom-up, collective responses to climate violence.
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    A poetics of ghosting in contemporary Irish and Northern Irish Drama.
    (2012-04) Martinovich, Mary Katherine
    In this dissertation I examine the poetics of ghosting in nine Irish and Northern Irish dramatic texts. In these texts by Sebastian Barry, Marina Carr, Michael Duke, Brian Friel, Ben Hennessy, Frank McGuinness, Stewart Parker, and Vincent Woods, the ghost's story interrogates yet unites multiple narratives of history, identity, and memory. Together these plays represent a significant strain of Ireland's dramatic literature that dwells on historical trauma specifically through the figure of the ghost. Each chapter focuses on a historical event or problem as yet unresolved in the late 20th century: the historical remembrance and forgetting of Irish soldiers who served in World War One; the cycle of violence and trauma of the Troubles in Northern Ireland; and the home/scape that trapped women between the ideals of Mother Ireland and the everyday violences, disappointments, and impossibilities of actual motherhood. In the plays, the corporeal ghost is part of a past that has been invisibilized by stronger historical and political forces and thus makes its presence known in order to speak to, and as, the irresolvability of that past. A dramaturgy of ghosts and haunting emphasizes both a material manifestation and a collective haunting of the historical legacy of trauma. I argue that the ghost in dramatic representation points toward a cultural need to allow the conflicts of the past to remain unresolved, while the ghost also invites the imagining of a different future.
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    Pouvoir, violence et resistance en postcolonie : une lecture de en attendant le vote des betes Sauvages E’Ahmadou Kourouma
    (2008-12) Ngong, Benjamin
    This dissertation examines violence as portrayed in African literature, with particular attention to Ahmadou Kourouma’s En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, to show that African fiction seems to absorb tragic facts cathartically and subsequently operates as acts of resistance against the after-effects of colonialism and abuses of power by dictatorial African regimes since independence. I argue that violence in Francophone post-colonial societies arises from two sources. Europe is the first source, as a consequence of its policies of imperialism, ethnocentrism, and racism against people who did not correspond to the required criteria of the “superior race.” This idea of a "perfect race" has survived to the present, but in a less radical form. The second source is from within Africa, and stems from the aftermath of the era of colonization. In studying the links between these two sources, I demonstrate that the responsibility for today’s political violence and abuses in postcolonial societies must be shared by both France and the corrupt regimes it imposed on its former colonies. On the one hand, survivors of independence recall how France eliminated any popular nationalist leaders, installing corrupt, bureaucratic regimes; on the other hand, those bureaucratic regimes’ continued pillaging replicates colonial exploitation of the past. Two forms of civilian resistance and cultural subversion particular to literature enable Francophone authors to maneuver across and through the official discourses that attempt to speak for the people, ultimately challenging the bases of single-ruler tyrannies that masquerade as democracies. I build on the works of Pierre Bourdieu and his theory of “habitus” to illustrate how social agents develop strategies adapted to the needs of the social worlds that they inhabit. These strategies are unconscious, and act at times with violence on the level of a bodily logic. I borrow Cameroon political theorist Achille Mbembe’s theory of “banality of power” and his notion of “Postcolony” to endorse his stance that “Francophone Africa has a specifically given historical trajectory - that of societies recently emerging from the experience of colonization and violence that the colonial and postcolonial relationship involves,” that launched Africa into the “never-ending process of brutalization.
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    The Spectacle of the Suffering Body: Seventeenth-century Aesthetics of Violence
    (2015-07) Bowman, Melanie
    This dissertation treats the aesthetics and ethics of theatrical violence, focusing on late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in France. Tragedy took on the impossible task of presenting, to use Elaine Scarry’s formulation, “world-destroying” pain, using a variety of stage techniques to absorb, amplify, and dissimulate violence. It managed a constant alternation between terror and its foreclosure. Suffering is impossible to represent, and yet it regularly informs the way in which individuals and the theater of state conceive of power, learning, and productive work. Throughout, I consider the ways in which these figure amplify or circumvent an aesthetics of confrontation between tyrant and rebel. Daggers, bloody cloth, and female witnesses to violence absorbed, amplified, and dissimulated the strong affects associated with scenes of suffering bodies. In Chapter 1, I investigate how the weapon in plays such as "Didon se sacrifiant"(circa 1605), "Scédase" (circa 1610), and "Le Cid" (1637) absorb the affects and efficacy associated with sacrificial violence. These plays present violence as a compelling theatrical enactment that could spread itself like a contagion. Chapter 2 focuses on bloody cloth, which in "La mort d’Hercule" (1634), and "Cinna" (1639) both stands in for scenes of bodily suffering and facilitates a transformation from gore to glory. In Chapter 3 I study the shifting status of the witness to state violence by focusing on plays featuring female protagonists who survive brothers. In Garnier’s "Antigone" (1580), Rotrou’s 1637 play of the same name, Hardy’s "Mariamne" (circa 1610) and Tristan l’Hermite’s "La Marianne" (1637), sororal mourning increasingly masked suffering and violence.
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    Speculating Abolition: Alternatives Models Of Redress In Black And Indigenous Feminist Speculative Fiction
    (2024-04) Ornelas, E.
    Policing and prisons don’t solve the problems of interpersonal and institutional violence and harm, and in fact fail those most vulnerable to violence. Speculating Abolition: Alternative Forms of Redress in Black and Indigenous Feminist Speculative Fiction, analyzes contemporary North American Anglophone fiction from Black and Indigenous women, queer, trans, and Two Spirit people in order to conceive of a world free of the carceral settler state. In the hands of Black and Indigenous peoples, speculating as a gerundive verb form—rather than an adjective—is a distinct practice of reading and creating, defined by its promise of imagining otherwise. Hence, I ask: How do these works help envision alternatives to forms of redress like the criminal punishment system? What do literary texts illustrate as possible options for and limits to resistance in the face of gendered, racialized, and colonial interpersonal and institutional violence? And how can these speculative visions transform broader debates about models of justice? The arc of this project traces ways to enact redress without policing and prisons, instead moving toward healing and away from harm. The introduction grounds the work in an abolitionist feminism that takes seriously the critiques of traditional Western forms of “justice.” My first chapter asks necessary questions of the place of punishment in lieu of the carceral settler state, particularly in the case of egregious crimes like sexual assault witnessed within Octavia Butler’s novel Dawn. The second chapter argues that a crucial part of addressing interpersonal and institutional violence without state apparatuses is to directly confront those who are causing harm, like in Mariame Kaba’s short story “Justice” as well as Cherie Dimaline’s (Métis) The Marrow Thieves. When facing conflict head-on isn’t effective or feasible, my third chapter encourages a turn inward towards those most affected by violence, through the fugitivity, generative refusal, and cultural reclamation seen in Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts and Adam Garnet Jones’s (Cree/Métis) short story “The History of the New World.” Finally, the conclusion speculates about the application of these lessons for scholars and activists to prefigure abolition. Ultimately, I present a case against punitive measures for those who commit harm, by asserting that more restorative and transformative options are reflected in Black and Indigenous feminist literature.
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    Violence against women on the college campus: evaluating anti-violence programming.
    (2010-03) Gibbons, Roberta E.
    Violence against women is a significant problem on America's college campuses. In response to this violence, many universities have developed direct service programs to assist the survivors of violence as well as educational programs to raise awareness about and/or reduce the likelihood of such violence. There has been no scholarly inquiry regarding the success of direct services for survivors of violence on the college campus, and only a small number of studies have ventured to investigate the effectiveness of anti-violence educational programming. This study employed a three-phase sequential mixed methods design to explore the definition of success for these anti-violence direct services and educational programs, as well as to investigate how such programs conceptualize and use evaluation. Specifically, this study used document review, focus groups, and a self-administered survey. The population for this study was the group of institutions of higher education that were funded by the federal Grants to Reduce Violence Against Women on Campus in 2008 (N=54). This exploratory study had numerous findings related to how program staff members define success and what they think about and how they use evaluation. Success for victim service programs seemed to be based primarily on process rather than outcomes, and there was very little expectation on the part of university administrators or the federal funding agency to demonstrate effectiveness. Staff members reported that outcomes were largely considered incommensurable with advocacy-based models of direct services on the college campus. There was more reported assessment of educational programming, with most universities employing local and informal approaches to evaluation. This study found evidence of instrumental and process use of evaluation and identified areas that may need clarification in the conceptualization of evaluation influence.
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    Violencia, literatura, y el Estado en la narrativa mexicana de los siglos XX y XXI.
    (2022-02) Fajardo Sotelo, Guillermo
    This dissertation examines, analyzes, and explain, through literary representation, a multiplicity of violent phenomena in Mexico. From drug trafficking to gender violence, this collection of essays seeks to pinpoint at the causes of this violence, its origins, and its evolution. By using a wide array of Latin American authors from the 20th and 21st century, each of these chapters looks at a specific angle of the violence that has plagued contemporary Mexico.
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    Violent subjects: a rhetorical cartography of bodies, spaces, and technologies in the global war on terror
    (2013-04) Hayes, Heather Ashley
    Looking to the bodies of suicide attackers, to the circulating technologies of the United States drone program, and to the space of Egypt's Tahrir Square in January of 2011, this project expands the ways rhetorical studies has conceptualized the relationship between violence and discourse. It also generates political and cultural insights about the possibilities for newly formed subjectivities and their relationship to violence within the global war on terror and beyond. The monograph argues that these insights point to a refiguration of the rhetorical situation as primarily composed of bodies, spaces/places, and technologies and attends to the ways different subjectivities arise and circulate within larger maps of contemporary global power. More specifically, the project produces three areas of insight. First, for rhetorical studies, it suggests a refiguring of the rhetorical situation to be understood as material. As such, it suggests that the rhetorical situation is composed of bodies, technologies, and spaces/places. This new transsituated circuit would replace the understanding of the rhetorical situation as primarily composed of exigencies, audiences, and constraints as previously argued in the context of rhetorical studies scholarship. Second, for interdisciplinary modes of investigation, the project further develops rhetorical cartography as a method of inquiry, drawing foundationally from both rhetorical studies and from critical cartography and geography. This method allows for mapping of modes of materiality within rhetorical situations and cultural moments. Finally, the project suggests political and cultural insights for understanding the conjuncture of the global war on terror. Here, the project posits that through rhetorical cartography, we can better understand the multitude of ways that subject positions are generated, changed, and reconstituted for people to occupy within the global war on terror.